The CIA and the Gulf War
by John Stockwell
A speech delivered on 1991-02-20 at the
Louden Nelson Community Center, Santa Cruz, California
...
The conditioning to war in this country begins at the age of two, when we put our children in front of the one-eyed baby-sitter, and we turn it on and we go wash dishes or sweep the floor or clean the car — and we teach them. Actually, little kids (I don't know if you've done this recently), they're bored with TV at first. You have to get them hooked on it. We teach them, actually, to watch television. And very quickly they learn. And then they get to where they're watching 10 to 15 to 20 shows a day, all of them the same show, the same story with different characters. I call it the "American Syndrome." I'm talking about ..... We're raising a little boy who's 12 now. And he's heard my lectures. And I have to sit down and watch some of his TV with him so I can understand. You know, he says, "Daddy, c'mere." So, we've watched, over recent years: HE-MAN, SHEENA, THE THUNDERCATS, SCOOBY-DOO, and now it's the NINJA TURTLES, and THE RAIDERS — I forget. Always the same plot: Nice little people — attractive, usually light-skinned or light- complected, who are put upon by ugly, dark, evil forces like Skeletor. And they always say: "Please be nice. We don't want trouble." And the evil forces always insist. And at the last minute they leap around and miraculously defeat the evil forces. Cut! Commercial! And we plunge back into the same story with other characters. The "American Syndrome" of the nice people who loathe war, who wouldn't go to war, ever, except it's drummed into Americans from the age of two, that we're a nice, peace-loving nation, the good guys of the World who very reluctantly go to war when evil forces force it upon us.
Then you get into the stuff that we've treated ourselves to in the eighties during this cycle of war-mongering: RAMBO, COMMANDO, RED DAWN, ROCKY series, UNDER SIEGE, DELTA FORCE, AMERIKA, MISSING IN ACTION, TOP GUN, HEARTBREAK RIDGE, DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR, PLATOON, HAMBURGER HILL, TOUR OF DUTY, CHINA BEACH, and the list is going on and on and on with the violent war movies.
Now once again, to analyze one of these, to give you ..... How many people saw the movie, RED DAWN? Now this is fun. How many people, when you saw it, knew that this was intended to be a war propaganda movie? The producer went around the nation, going on television, saying: "I wanted to make a movie that would make people feel positive about war." So this is an up-front, propaganda commercial, propaganda movie. So, we can analyze it to see: How do they motivate us to war when they want to make such a movie. And so, you take the plot. It's science fiction. They have a scenario set up — which you buy into in the first minute — that's impossible, unreal. There's a force of Russians, Cubans and Nicaraguans that has invaded the United States and gotten all the way to the Rocky Mountains, and blown off our nuclear weapons. Our Army doesn't exist. They're just there. And the people are struggling against them. AMERIKA, of course, had the same plot, a little bit. Now, so you've asked: "Why did they pick Russia, Cuba, and Nicaragua?" It had to be Russia, of course, but a better plot would have been Russia, Canada and Mexico, or at least Russia, Canada and Cuba, because you know they could be coming across this vast border with Canada and pinning us up against Cuba and you could, you know, almost get into that as science fiction. So why Nicaragua? They [the U.S. Government] had decided to fight a [real] war in Nicaragua. So, it was essential that they begin to condition people to see Nicaragua as an enemy who would invade us if they could. This is science fiction. Nicaragua has never indicated any desire whatsoever to invade or hurt the United States. So this force gets all the way to the Rocky Mountains where they're eventually stopped by the high school football team, with the cheerleaders helping out, drinking deer's blood in the mountains.
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